Re: File identification problem.

Is it possible that the file is installed with the INSTALL utility? If a file is installed, VMS looks for the version that is installed. If you include a semi-colon in the file spec, it ignores the installed file information.

Re: File identification problem.

We have resolved this issue.A system reboot untwisted it's knickers, so all post-reboot files were behaving as normal.To fix the 'corrupted' files, I copied them to the same area with a generation of ;10, and purged them, which fixed it.

Many thanks for your time and suggestions guys, much appreciated as always.Dave.

Re: File identification problem.

How did you identify that certain files were still corrupt after the reboot?

What exactly was the problem?

I have two reasons for asking(a) As Hoff says, you may still have problems that will continue to play havoc with your file systems(b) An important use of this forum is a resource to search when looking for answers to one's own problems. Recording what the problem was, no matter if it was self-inflicted, might help others avoid or rapidly resolve a similar problem in future.

Re: File identification problem.

Unlike some operating systems, OpenVMS tends to be completely deterministic, so reboots typically DO NOT change behaviour.

The 3R "solutions" (Restart, Reboot, Reinstall) don't have a place in the OpenVMS world, which is one reason that some of us inhabit it.

If you DO find a significant change in behaviour after a reboot (such as you describe), I'd strongly suspect something else is going on, and probably has NOT been fixed, just covered up. Now that you've rebooted, any diagnostic information has been lost.

For the future, if you see similar symptoms, particularly the same file or disk, I'd suggest you call in an expert to do some proper diagnosis. Alternatively, rather than just reboot, force a crash so the dump can be analysed.

Re: File identification problem.

And btw. this is neither a problem with OpenVMS file identification nor are these corrupted files.

It seems to be a problem with your "dil" command (I doubt you made a typo). There could be a command procedure activated for "dil" who knows. That is all I could figure out from the information you provided.

For any file, there would be entry in two places.One in the INDEXF.SYS file and another in the directory file in which the fileresides. If you only issue a DIR command, the filename would be read from thedirectory itself. In case you also issue qualifiers such as /DATE or /SIZE andso on... the data corresponding to this would have to be read from theINDEXF.SYS file. As you are able to get these details above, means that thefile has entries in both the INDEXF.SYS file and directory.

From the data available, its hard to say what the root cause of the problem is.If problem reoccurs, the data to collect for analysis would be -

Re: File identification problem.

Barring cases of operational errors...

This (still) reeks of a file system or directory cache or volume corruption, or of a nasty executive-mode file system or I/O caching bug, of a memory or processor error, or an un-shadowed disk block error, or of a controller- or clustering- or firmware-related issue within the storage.

And no, these sorts of cases variously won't end well.

While I disagree with John G's position on the need to reboot servers (IMO, striving for longer server uptimes can be a deceptively poor practice, and longer uptimes can be one of the better outward signs of lurking managerial, operational and application stability issues), I do agree with John here; that a reboot should not be expected to fix cases such as this one.

Re: File identification problem.

I wouldn't use /REPAIR immediately. Run it without first in order to understand the magnitude of the problem. It shouldn't take much more than 5 minutes to run unless things are very sick.

Also, are you running a defragger on the disk in question? I have seen instances where defraggers corrupted files, but admittedly not for several years.

Finally, how is the disk used and with what kind of IO rates? The symptoms you described could occur if there's a job that renames files and you happened to find the file just before the rename but when you looked again it couldn't be found under the old name.

Re: File identification problem.

Dave,I agree with John that ANALYZE/DISK without /REPAIR should be done first.However if you plan to run ANALYZE/DISK without the /REPAIR qualifierthen I would recommend using /LOCK qualifier to avoid any false alarms.

John,>> Also, are you running a defragger on the disk in question?>> I have seen instances where defraggers corrupted files, but>> admittedly not for several years.This sounds interesting.Can you give me some more details about which (DFO, DFU ...), how(any scenarios) defraggers can cause a directory file to get corrupted.